The dream is over pt II

Without Yoko Ono there would have been no Janov. She was the guiding force from about 1968 onwards. In agreeing to primal therapy, Lennon became the groom stripped bare by his suitor: it was Yoko who saw that he would have to stand naked before he could choose how he wanted to appear, to himself and others. It was also Yoko who spurred his interest in what used to be called avant-gardism. From the outset he was taken by the fact that she was a bona fide 'artist' in the sense that a rock and roll man is not. She had exhibition credits to her name and an eye for attractive ironies, drawn from Zen Buddhism and other oblique descriptive habits, whose origins lay well to the east of Maharishi country, and she could recast them as clever forms of New York minimalism. Her irony was evidence of something real, simple and true. She could stick an apple in an exhibition and ask for £200 to watch it decompose, somehow saying all that needed to be said about... what? The consumer society? The transience of matter? The Beatles? 'Here was someone,' Lennon remarks, 'that could turn me on to a million things.' He'd believed as much about the Maharishi, but he was in love with Yoko, and she with him.

He was also in a fix about her work. It got up his nose and then he adored it and then again he didn't, but really he did. She was 'avant-garde' and she was 'underground', and these were conditions to which he aspired. Very admirable models in those days, and a fulcrum of sorts on which the hippy thing, and the rock and roll thing, could turn fitfully towards an education in history. By 1966, when he saw her work at the Indica Gallery in Mason's Yard, only Russ Conway and Mrs Mills were less underground than the Beatles; only Herman's Hermits and the Way In boutique at Harrods were less avant-garde. The exhibition appealed to the Lennon of In Your Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works (and to the Lennon of 'Don't Let Me down' waiting in the wings):

'There was... a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder. You look through the spyglass and in tiny letters it says 'yes'. So it was positive. I felt relieved. It's a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say 'no' or 'fuck you' or something, it said 'yes'.'

He continued to be impressed and, in these interviews, he describes Yoko Ono as 'an intellectual', as though this was the source of his passion. But her case is more complex, as we can tell from a cursory glance at her CV. Zen Buddhism in postwar Japan was an anti-intellectual vogue and Yoko was very much a postwar person. Before the war, her father had worked overseas for the Yokohama Specie Bank and her early years were spent in San Francisco. She returned to Japan in 1937 at the age of five. Her mother took her back to San Francisco in 1940 and they went home in 1941. In March 1945, she survived the fire raid on Tokyo in the family bunker; her mother subsequently moved the children to a small village. After the war Yoko returned to school in Tokyo. All this is carefully explained by Murray Sayle in the catalogue of the Yes Yoko Ono exhibition in New York.'When Yoko and her classmates looked outside the school's high walls in the spring of 1946,' Sayle writes, 'they saw a city all but returned, as General Curtis LeMay had promised, to the Stone Age. Whole districts were sterile wastelands of twisted iron and blackened stones. People lived in holes clawed in the ground, roofed with stray sheets of metal... To sharpen the misery, American soldiers tootled around the ruins in jeeps.'

John and Yoko's infatuation with 'peace' turns out to have particular origins, while 'bed' - the peace bed - can now be seen as a kind of body-polemic not just against Vietnam, but against two strange and distressing pasts. Hers the turmoil of Japanese warmongering and American occupation. His, more personally, the austere milieu of peacetime reconstruction, in Liverpool especially, followed by the dizzying propulsion out of that world during the economic boom of the early 1960s and onto the Lennon-McCartney treadmill.

It was a roundabout case of West meets West. For, as Sayle points out, Zen Buddhism wasn't the only fashion in Japan during the brief cultural renaissance that followed defeat. There was also Dada, which had first reached Tokyo in the 1920s. The Dada of Hugo Ball and the Cabaret Voltaire had derived its health from the sickness of the Great War, but in Japan a few years later, it was simply a modish pudding in search of a proof. By the end of the Second World War, however, that was no longer the case and by the early 1960s, when Yoko returned to Tokyo after a decade in New York, she was exhibiting as part of a busy avant-garde which included a contingent of artists who thought of themselves as 'neo-Dadaists'.

All this has a bearing on the revised John Lennon. For if any member of the Beatles had a hidden affinity with Yoko - in terms of a taste for odd little juxtapositions, contrived production values, associative leaps and natty bricolage, it was surely Paul McCartney, who powered the band through its two triumphant perversities, the 'White Album' and Abbey Road. He liked to dub and mix and fiddle about and counterpoint one song against the other. Lennon may have seemed more outr and inquisitive, and of course he wasn't averse to montage - 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' was one of his favourite tracks - but if both men were intrigued by the tricks of the late Modernist trade, McCartney (who met Yoko before Lennon did) found them easier to transpose to pop music, while Lennon remained a little in awe of them, preferring them in galleries and books, including his own, with their cheery, paronomastic homage to the late Joyce. On the factory floor, so to speak, he hadn't the magpie instinct or the flair for asymmetry that went with the pop experiments of the period. In falling in love with Yoko, he fell for a more illustrious, less irritating version of McCartney.

Yet on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the great John Lennon album - and on much of what followed - the drift was emphatically unexperimental, autobiographical and expressive of John Himself. There simply was no interest in form as anything other than a means to that end. Fury about the death of Mama and the absence of Father ('Mother'); disdain transposed as funeral oration ('God'), thoroughgoing helplessness in love ('Look at Me'), likely-lad ressentiment ('Working-Class Hero') and so on. There's no arguing with the power of all these modes, the appeal to sympathy or the paradoxical achievement: the child's view of the world, so cherished in the 1960s, seems both to be recovered and irretrievably lost - Infant Joy flings all its toys out of the cot and goes into mourning, with one eye on survival and the clear space opening up ahead. There's nothing like it for another ten years, when Marianne Faithfull records Broken English.

'I'm not just talking about the Beatles is over,' Lennon said of 'God': 'I'm talking about the generation thing. The dream's over, and I have personally got to get down to so-called reality.' But there was no great awakening in the 1970s, only a recasting of earlier enthusiasms. And though Lennon talked more openly about politics and hitched his wagon more conspicuously to causes, he was strangely wide of the mark. He believed, as only a millionaire could, that 'Working-Class Hero' was 'a revolutionary song' (true, inasmuch as it forecast the Thatcher revolution); he had half a mind to idolise Mao (a lot of people did, from Richard Nixon to Julia Kristeva). At the same time, by putting his name to the idea of peace, he became an asset to the anti-war movement in the US. But 'me' remained uppermost, as he felt it should for an artist - to that extent he was a slave of convention - and, in the end, 'me' was him all over, the best place he could have ended up.

But, whoever one had become, being 'me' in the 1970s was no longer what it had been. By now, the pop-intellectual ideas of the self were at odds with one another and they'd grown more sophisticated. Feminism and 'men's groups' required a thorough remapping of 'me', and other pronouns. So did the sharp turn into the royal road of 'language' - with 'desire' bringing up the rear - which promised the revolution of the subject, and then a transformation of the world, almost by dint of radical representation alone. Language was the avant-garde's last big idea and Yoko Ono understood it better than Lennon. But ever since his exasperation with the Beatles, Lennon had kept a weather eye on what poets, artists, filmmakers and other musicians were doing. He studied the form. Whence his best remark of the interview - 'I'm a cinma-vrit guitarist-musician' - which suggests that he saw the point of all this disparate and opaque activity, even if he thought that lowly, ragged rock and roll did something just as drastic and engaging.

Elsewhere during the 1970s, older pop versions of 'me' seemed to consolidate. Not the extremist accounts of the damaged, beatific self in RD Laing and David Cooper, but a running tally of private hurt combined with an inventory of (equally private) need that thrived on a domestication of the visionary beliefs which gained currency in the 1960s. 'Alienation' was still being claimed as a negative human right and the celebration of the Hermann Hesse-like outsider - a wide-eyed, fragile soul, bullied into inconsequence by a brutish world - was common enough. It was okay to think of oneself as a china doll in Sparta. But the less Spartan the world became for the many prosperous survivors of the 1960s, the more insistent they seemed to be that the doll was traduced. Thirty years later, we have the four-wheel drive, assertiveness training and much else with which to pamper our dolls - and it's still possible to turn them into proto-radicals by clinging to the superstition that their every wish is by definition 'subversive'.

To hold John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band accountable for this would be to 'get the therapy confused with the music'. The music is about the pain of John Winston Lennon, as described by the new John Ono Lennon, ex-sibling of the Beatles, also orphaned by his first family which, for the purposes of this record, is the one that mattered: child of the absent and the dead. The new screaming and wailing, by the pain-artist, is a stoical performance. Indeed, it could hardly be further from the anti-stoicism of the 1960s, which was based on pleasure and dissent. At the same time it's a milestone on the winding road towards a degraded anti-stoicism in which nothing is more interesting than injury, or puts us more at ease.

As a loyal member of the multi-million artificial family that kept up an interest in black sheep, I still love John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and almost all the Beatles music, but it always puts me in mind of the many goings-on in the great concourse, as it was in the 1960s, with everyone swanning around under marshmallow skies - and of the ways people had of thinking they were all up to much the same thing. The openness of that great domain began to close around the time that Lennon discovered self-discovery in earnest. Structural cracks appeared in the faades and these became fissures; screens went up, partitions were built, it suddenly felt like an enormous flat-conversion. 'Personal space' began to matter.

Meanwhile, some kinds of politics, with which the hippy thing and the rock and roll thing could muddle along, began to achieve a healthy momentum that was too much for the freaks. They followed behind as best they could - especially in the US, largely because of the anti-war movement. But Haskell Wexler's movie, Medium Cool, set - and shot - at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 and released the following year, explains how fast things were changing, with five years of Vietnam to run. In Europe, it was La Chinoise and Weekend that infiltrated the land of magic mushrooms and patchouli. And before long the alliance of utopians, hedonists, anarchists and very satisfied music promoters that was tenuous enough at Woodstock seemed to come apart, with one tribe holding their copies of Steppenwolf and the other... I don't know, the new Penguin edition of The Wretched of the Earth or Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice.

Yet at the time of Lennon's murder in 1980, the concourse was under reconstruction. Everyone basked in the same life-giving warmth of market forces. In the Beatles generation, we could almost hear the strains of 'Good Day Sunshine' - very Paul McCartney - as we were decorously informed that the value of our share portfolios could go up as well as up. Some big ambitions had been reconfigured, the best things in life were undoubtedly for birds and bees, and cynicism, once a useful antidote to the old fantasies, was suddenly a badge of mediocrity. Lennon had a disagreeable wise guy side, but he was scarcely a cynic.

Everyone knows where John Lennon died - the Dakota Apartments, a morose cultural march stolen on Walt Disney in 1884, half a century before Snow White or Dumbo, by the architect Henry Hardenberg. I was living quite close at the time. Someone rang in what seemed like the middle of the night and I lay awake with the light on, intent on proving that I really couldn't care less. Pretty much like the Maharishi in fact - 'fucking idiot.' The following morning I bought some roses on Broadway and trudged towards the scene, taking my place by the police barriers with the weeping crowds. It was a mortified version of that screaming and wailing again, painfully frank and, by now, rather subdued. No need to threaten anyone with a shoe.

The longer I stayed, the stronger my dislike of the Dakota became. Even the flowers at its sinister gates took on the air of a tribute not to Lennon but to the building itself, which would sport this murder as a nasty feather in its cap, along with Rosemary's Baby and everything else. And it looked now as it was meant to look, scornfully unreal (un-simple, far from 'true'). You could imagine the fake thunderheads massing behind its towers as lightning rippled over Central Park. And all the while it lowered, like a cartoon palace in an out-take from Fantasia. Pepperland had finally been swallowed up by Disney and the man who wrote 'Strawberry Fields' had been claimed by America, the most voracious place on earth.

 To read more online essays from the current edition of the London Review of Books visit the LRB. The extensive online archive of essays from past editions includes John Lanchester on the rise of Microsoft, Alan Bennett's Diary and much more.

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About this article

The dream is over pt II

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 07.36 EST on Thursday 21 December 2000.
It was last modified at 07.36 EST on Tuesday 4 December 2001.
It was first published at 07.36 EST on Tuesday 4 December 2001.